The Emergence of a Low-Tech Ecosystem in Normandy: Sustainability, Resilience, and the Social and Solidarity Economy?[El surgimiento de un ecosistema «low-tech» en Normandía: ¿sostenibilidad, resiliencia y economía social y solidaria?]

This paper presents the initial findings of the TerrLowTech research project, funded by the Normandy Region through the Normandie Recherche - Projets Émergents program. The project examines the framework of low-tech technological development as a potential driver of social and ecological transition and as a key component of a regional economic community. It aims to analyze how Normandy-based actors are adopting the concept of low-tech, their production practices, their organizational models, and their economic potential in support of the region's sustainability and resilience. Particular attention is paid to the regional roots of this emerging community and its links with actors in the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE). Low-tech is understood as a set of low-intensity, accessible, and sustainable technologies with low energy and ecological impacts (Low-Tech Lab, n.d.), but also as a distinct approach to production and consumption (Bloquel et al., 2022). It is adopted by economic actors seeking to shift their production practices toward models that are more sustainable and resilient to climate change. These actors appear to collaborate and organize at the local level through forms of territorialized cooperation and coordination.To analyze these dynamics, this paper draws on the theoretical frameworks of entrepreneurial ecosystems (Messeghem, Theodoraki & Carayannis, 2023), localized production systems (Sarrazin, 2016), technology clusters (Savoie-Dansereau, 2018; Doloreux & Savoie-Dansereau, 2019), as well as the concepts of territorial intermediation (Nadou & Pecqueur, 2020) and organized proximities (Gilly & Torre, 2000; Torre, 2018). The aim is to examine the unifying nature of the low-tech concept and its ability to structure a territorialized community of actors, as well as the role and permeability of SSE structures within this ecosystem, and the permeability between the two environments. The results presented are based on the project's first qualitative phase, which drew on approximately twenty semi-structured interviews analyzed according to the principles of grounded theory (Allard, Genest & Legault, 2020). The study also draws on public data from documents, websites, and social media to propose an initial mapping of Normandy-based organizations structuring their relationships around low-tech, using a network analysis approach based on digital objects.